C:\Users\John\Downloads\J\Jane Yolen - Sister Emily's Lightship.pdb

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Jane Yolen - Sister Emily's Lig

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30/12/2007

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SISTER EMILY’S LIGHTSHIP
by
Jane Yolen
I dwell in Possibility. The pen scratched over the page, making graceful
ellipses. She liked the look of the black on white as much as the words
themselves. The words sang in her head far sweeter than they sang on the page.
Once down, captured like a bird in a cage, the tunes seemed pedestrian, mere
common rote. Still, it was as close as she would come to that Eternity, that
Paradise that her mind and heart promised.
I dwell in Possibility.

She stood and stretched, then touched her temples where the poem still
throbbed. She could feel it sitting there, beating its wings against her head
like that captive bird. Oh, to let the bird out to sing for a moment in the
room before she caged it again in the black bars of the page.
Smoothing down the skirt of her white dress, she sat at the writing table once
more, took up the pen, dipped it into the ink jar, and added a second line.
A fairer House than . . .
than what? Had she lost the word between standing and sitting? Words were not
birds after all, but slippery as fish.
Then, suddenly, she felt it beating in her head.
Prose! A fairer House than Prose-
She let the black ink stretch across the page with the long dash that lent the
last word that wonderful fall of tone. She preferred punctuating with the dash
to the hard point, as brutal as a bullet.
I dwell in Possibility.
She blotted the lines carefully before reading them aloud, her mouth forming
each syllable perfectly as she had been taught so many years before at Miss
Lyon's Mount Holyoke Fe-male Seminary.
Cocking her head to one side, she considered the lines.
They will do, she thought, as much praise as she ever allowed her own work,
though she was generous to others. Then, straightening the paper and cleaning
the nib of her pen, she tore up the false starts and deposited them in the
basket.
She could, of course, write any time during the day if the lines came to mind.
There was little enough that she had to do in the house. But she preferred
night for her truest composition and perhaps that was why she was struggling
so.
Then those homey tasks will take me on, she told herself: supervising the
gardening, baking Father's daily bread. Her poetry must never be put in the
same category.
Standing, she smoothed down the white skirt again and tidied her hair--"like a
chestnut bur," she'd once written imprudently to a friend. It was ever so much
more faded now.
But pushing that thought aside, Emily went quickly out of the room as if
leaving considerations of vanity behind. Besides the hothouse flowers, besides

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the bread, there was a cake to be made for tea.
After Professor Seelye's lecture there would be guests and her tea cakes were
expected.
The tea had been orderly, the cake a success, but Emily headed back upstairs
soon after, for her eyes--always sensitive to the light --had begun to tear
up. She felt a sick headache starting. Rather than impose her ailments on her
guests, she slipped away. They would understand.
Carlo padded up the stairs behind her, so quiet for such a large dog. But how
slow he had become these last months. Emily knew that Death would stop for him
soon enough. Newfoundlands were not a long-lived breed usually, and he had
been her own shaggy ally for the past fifteen years.
Slowing her pace, despite the stabbing behind her eyes, Emily let the old dog
catch up. He shoved his rough head under her hand and the touch salved them
both.
He curled beside her bed and slept, as she did, in an afternoon made night and
close by the window blinds.
It was night in truth when Emily awoke, her head now wonderfully clear. Even
the dreadful sleet in her eyes was gone.
She rose and threw on a dressing gown. She owed Loo a letter, and Samuel and
Mary Bowles.

But still the night called to her. Others might hate the night, hate the cold
of November, huddling around their stoves in overheated houses. But November
seemed to her the very Norway of the year.
She threw open first the curtains, then the blinds, almost certain of a sight
of actual fjords. But though the Gibraltar lights made the village look almost
foreign, it was not--she decided--foreign enough.
"That I had the strength for travel," she said aloud. Carlo answered her with
a quick drum roll of tail.
Taking that as the length of his sympathy, she nodded at him, lit the already
ensconced candle, and sat once again at the writing table. She read over the
morning's lines:
/
dwell in Possibility -
A fairer House than Prose
-
It no longer had the freshness she remembered, and she sighed.
At the sound, Carlo came over to her and laid his rough head in her lap, as if
trying to lend comfort.
"No comfort to be had, old man," she said to him. "I can no longer tell if the
trouble is my wretched eyes, sometimes easy and sometimes sad. Or the
dis-order of my mind. Or the slant of light on the page.
Or the words themselves. Or something else altogether. Oh, my dear dog ..."
She leaned over and buried her face in his fur but did not weep for she
despised private grief that could not be turned into a poem. Still, the touch
had a certain efficaciousness, and she stood and walked over to the window.
The Amherst night seemed to tremble in on itself. The street issued a false
invitation, the maples standing sentinel between the house and the promise of
road.
"Keeping me in?" she asked the dog, "or others out?" It was only her wretched
eyes that forced her to stay at home so much and abed. Only her eyes, she was
convinced. In fact she planned a trip into town at noon next when the very day
would be la-conic; if she could get some sleep and if the
November light proved not too harsh.
She sat down again at the writing table and made a neat pile of the poems she
was working on, then set them aside. Instead she would write a letter. To ...
to Elizabeth. "Dear Sister," she would start as always, even though their
relationship was of the heart, not the blood. "I will tell her about the
November light," she said to Carlo. "Though it is much the same in Springfield

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as here, I trust she will find my observations entertaining."
The pen scratched quickly across the page.
So much quicker, she thought, than when I am composing a poem.
She was deep into the fourth paragraph, dashing "November always seemed to me
the Norway
..." when a sharp knock on the wall shattered her peace, and a strange
insistent whine seemed to fill the room.
And the light.
Oh the light!
-
Brighter even than day.
"Carlo!" she called the dog to her, and he came, crawling, trembling. So large
a dog and such a larger fright. She fell on him as a drowning person falls on
a life preserver. The light made her eyes weep pitchers. Her head began to
ache. The house rocked.
And then-as quickly as it had come-it was gone: noise, light, all, all gone.
Carlo shook her off as easily as bath water, and she collapsed to the floor,
unable to rise.
Lavinia found her there on the floor in the morning, her dressing gown
disordered and her hands over her eyes.
"Emily, my dear, my dear . . ." Lavinia cried, lifting her sis-ter entirely by
herself back onto the bed. "Is it the terror again?" It was much worse than
the night terrors, those unrational fears which had afflicted her for years.
But Emily had not the strength to contradict. She lay on the bed hardly moving
the en-tire day while Mother bathed her face and hands with aromatic spirits
and Vinnie read to her. But she could not concentrate on what Vinnie read;
neither the poetry of Mrs. Browning nor the prose of

George Eliot soothed her. She whimpered and trembled, recalling vividly the
fierceness of that midnight light. She feared she was, at last, going mad.
"Do not leave, do not leave," she begged first Vinnie, then Mother, then
Austin, who had been called to the house in the early hours. Father alone had
been left to his sleep. But they did go, to whisper together in the hall. She
could not hear what they said but she could guess that they were discussing
places to send her away. For a rest. For a cure. For-Ever-
She slept, waked, slept again. Once she asked for her writing tablet, but all
she managed to write on it was the word light ten times in a column like some
mad ledger. They took the tablet from her and refused to give it back.
The doctor came at nine, tall and saturnine, a new man from Northampton.
Vinnie said later he looked more like an under-taker than a physician. He
scolded Emily for rising at midnight and she was too exhausted to tell him
that for her it was usual. Mother and Vinnie and Austin did not tell him for
they did not know. No one knew that midnight was her favorite time of the
clock. That often she walked in the garden at midnight and could distinguish,
just by the smell, which flowers bloomed and bloomed well.
That often she sat in the garden seat and gazed up at the great eight-sided
cupola Father had built onto the house. His one moment of monumental
playfulness. Or she sat at the solitary hour inside the cupola contemplating
night through each of the windows in turn, gazing round at all the world that
was hers.
"Stay in bed, Miss Dickinson," warned the doctor, his chapped hands delicately
in hers. "Till we have you quite well again. Finish the tonic I am leaving
with your mother for you. And then you must eschew the night and its vapors."
Vinnie imitated him quite cruelly after he left. "Oh, the vaypures, the
vay-pures!" she cried, hand to her forehead. Unac-countably, Carlo howled
along with her recitation.
Mother was--as usual--silently shocked at Vinnie's mim-icry but made no
remonstrances.
"He looks--and sounds--quite medieval," Austin com-mented laconically.

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At that Emily began to laugh, a robust hilarity that brought tears to her poor
eyes. Austin joined with her, a big stirring hur-rah of a laugh.
"Oh, dear Emily," Vinnie cried. "Laugh on! It is what is best for you."
Best for what?
Emily asked herself, but did not dare say it aloud. But she vowed she would
never let the doctor touch her again.
Having slept all day meant that she was awake at midnight, still she did not
venture out of the bed. She lay awake fearing to hear once more the horrid
knock and feel the house shake and see the piercing white light. A line of
poetry ran through her mind:
Me come! My dazzled face.
--
But her mind was so befogged that she could not recall if it were her own line
or if she had read it somewhere.
At the last nothing more happened and she must have fallen back to sleep some
time after two.
When she woke it was mid-morning and there was a tray by her bed with tea and
toast and some of her own strawberry preserves.
She knew she was well again when she realized Carlo was not in the room. He
would never have left her side otherwise.
Getting out of the bed was simple. Standing without sway-ing was not. But she
gathered up her dressing gown, made a swift toilette, then went downstairs
carrying the tray. Some ill-nesses she knew, from her months with the eye
doctors in Cambridgeport, are best treated like a bad boy at school.
Quickly beaten, quicker trained.
If the family was surprised to see her, they knew better than to show it.
"Shall we have Susie and little Ned for tea?" she asked by way of greeting.
* * *

Sue came over promptly at four, as much to check up on Emily's progress as to
have tea. Austin must have insisted. Heavily pregnant, she walked slowly while
Ned, a rambunctious four-year-old, capered ahead.
"Dear critic," Emily said, answering the door herself. She kissed Sue on both
cheeks and led her through into the hall. "And who is slower today, you with
your royal front or me with my rambling mind."
"Nonsense!" Sue said. "You are indulging yourself in fan-cies. Neddie, stop
jumping about. Your
Aunt Emily is just out of a sickbed."
The boy stopped for a moment and then flung himself into Emily's skirts,
crying, "Are you hurt?
Where does it hurt? Shall I kiss it?"
Emily bent down and said, "Your
Uncle
Emily shall kiss you instead, for I am not hurt at all. We boys never cry at
hurts." She kissed the top of his fair head, which sent him into paroxysms of
laughter.
Sue made a tch sound with her tongue. "And once you said to me that if you saw
a bullet hit a bird and he told you he wasn't shot, you might weep at his
courtesy, but you would certainly doubt his word."
"Unfair! Unfair to quote me back at me!" Emily said, taking Sue's hands. "Am I
not this moment the very pink of health?"
"That is not what Austin said, who saw you earlier today. And there is a white
spot between your eyes as if you have lain with a pinched expression all
night."
"And all morning, too. Come in here, Sue," Vinnie called from the sitting
room. "And do not chastize her any more than I have already. It does no good
you know."
They drank their tea and ate the crumbles of the cake from the day before,
though it mortified Emily that they had to do so. But she had had no time to

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prepare more for their small feast. Neddie had three pieces anyway, two of his
own and one Emily gave him from her own plate because suddenly the cake was
too sweet, the light too bright, the talk too brittle, and Emily tired past
bearing it all.
She rose abruptly. Smiling, she said, "I am going back to bed."
"We have overworn you," Sue said quickly.
"And I you," Emily answered.
"I am not tired, Auntie," Ned said.
"You never are," Vinnie said fondly.
"I am in the evening," Ned conceded. "And sometimes in . . ."
But Emily heard no more. The stairs effectively muffled the rest of the
conversation as she sought the sanctuary of her room.
I dwell in Possibility -

She sat at the desk and read the wavering line again. But what possibilities
did she, indeed, dwell in?
This house, this room, the garden, the lawn between her house and Austin's
stately "Evergreens." They were all the possibilities she had. Even the trips
to Cambridgeport for eye treatments had held no great promise. All her
traveling--and what small journies they had proved--lay in the past. She was
stuck, like a cork in an old bottle without promise of wine. Stuck here in the
little town where she had been born.
She went over to the bed and flung herself down on her stomach and wept
quietly into the pillow until the early November dark gathered around her.
It was an uncharacteristic and melodramatic scene, and when she sat up at
last, her cheeks reddened and quite swollen, she forgave herself only a
little.
"Possibly the doctor's tonic has a bite at the bottom," she whispered to
Carlo, who looked up at her with such a long face that she had to laugh, her
cheeks tight with the salty tears. "Yes, you are right. I
have the vay-pures." She stood and, without lighting a lamp, found the wash
basin and bathed her face.
She was not hungry, either for food or company, and so she sat in the
gathering gloom thinking about her life. Despite her outburst, she quite liked
the tidiness of her cocoon. She doubted she had the

capacity for wings or the ability for flight.
When it was totally dark, she went back to her bed and lay down, not to sleep
but to wait till the rest of the household slept.
The grandfather clock on the landing struck eleven. She waited an-other
fifteen minutes before rising. Grabbing a woolen shawl from the foot of the
bed, she rose ghostlike and slipped from the room.
The house breathed silent sleep around her. Mother, Father, Vinnie, Cook had
all gone down the corridors of rest, leaving not a pebble behind for her to
follow.
She climbed the stairs up to the cupola for she had not the will nor might to
brave November's garden. Still, she had to get away from the close surround of
family and the cupola was as far as she could go.
She knew which risers creaked alarmingly and, without thinking, avoided them.
But behind her
Carlo trod on every one. The passage was not loud enough to waken the sleepers
who had heard it all before without stirring, yet Emily still held her breath
till they reached the top unremarked.
Putting her hand on the dog's head for a moment, to steady them both, she
climbed up into the dome of the house. In the summer there was always a fly or
two buzzing about the win-dows and she quite liked them, her "speck pianos."
But in No-vember the house was barren of flies. She would have to make all the
buzz herself.
Sitting on the bench, she stared out of the windows at the glittering stars

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beyond the familiar elms.
How could she have abjured this peace for possibilities unknown?
"Oh, Carlo," she whispered to the dog, "we must be careful what we say. No
bird resumes its egg."
He grunted a response and settled down at her feet for the long watch.
"Like an old suitor," she said, looking down fondly at him. "We are, you know,
too long engaged, too short wed. Or some such." She laughed. "I think the
prognosis is that my madness is quite advanced."
When she looked up again, there was a flash of light in the far-off sky, a
star falling to earth.
"Make a wish, Carlo," she said gaily. "I know I shall."
And then the top of the cupola burst open, a great gush of sound enveloped
them, and she was pulled up into the light.
Am I dead?
she thought at first. Then, Am I rising to Heaven?
Then, Shall I have to answer to
God?
That would be the prime embarrassment, for she had always held out against the
bland-ishments of her redeemed family, saying that she was religious without
that great Eclipse, God. She always told them that life was itself mystery and
consecration enough.
Oh, do not let it be a jealous God, she thought.
I would have too much to explain away.
Peculiarly this light did not hurt her eyes, which only served to convince her
that she was, indeed, dead. And then she wondered if there would be actual
angels as well, further insult to her heresy.
Perhaps they will have butterfly wings, she thought.
I would like that.
She was amused, briefly, in her dying by these wild fancies.
And then she was no longer going upward, and there was once more a steady
ground beneath her feet where Carlo growled but did not otherwise move. Walls,
smooth and anony-mous, curved away from her like the walls of a cave.
A hallway, she thought, but one without signature.
A figure came toward her, but if that were an angel, all of Amherst's
Congregational Church would come over faint! It wore no gown of alabaster
satin, had no feathery wings. Rather it was a long, sleek, gray man with
enormous adamantine eyes and a bulbed head rather like a leek's.
A leek--I am surely mad!

she thought. All poetry fled her mind.
Carlo was now whining and trembling beyond measure. She bent to comfort him;
that he should share her madness was past understanding.

"Do not be afraid," the gray man said.
No--the bulbed thing--
for she now saw it was not a man at all, though like a man it had arms and
legs and a head. But the limbs were too long, the body too thin, the head too
round, the eyes too large. And though it wore no discernible clothing, it did
not seem naked.
"Do not be afraid," it repeated, its English curiously ac-cented. It came down
rather heavily on the word be for no reason that Emily could tell. Such
accentuation did not change the message.
If not an angel, a demon--
But this her unchurched mind credited even less.
She mustered her strength; she could when courage was called for. "Who--or
what--are you?"
The bulb creature smiled. This did not improve its looks. "I am a traveler,"
it said.
"And where do you travel?" That she was frightened did not give her leave to

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forget all manners.
And besides, curiosity had now succeeded fear.
"From a far . . ." The creature hesitated. She leaned into its answer. "From a
far star."
There was a sudden rip in the fabric of her world.
"Can you show me?" It was not that she did not believe the stranger, but that
she did. It was the very possibility that she had, all unknowing, hoped for,
wept for.
"Show you?"
"The star."
"No."
The rip was repaired with clumsy hands. She would always see the darn.
"It is too far for sight."
"Oh."
"But I can show you your own star."
"And what do you want from me in exchange?" She knew enough of the world to
know this.
For a moment the creature was silent. She feared she had embarrassed it. Or
angered it. Then it gave again the grimace that was its smile. "Tell me what
it is you do in this place."
She knew this was not an idle question. She chose her an-swer with care. "I
tell the truth," she said.
"But I tell it slant."
"Ah . . ." There was an odd light in the gray creature's eyes. "A poet."
She nodded. "I have some small talent."
"I, myself, make . . . poems. You will not have heard of me, but my name is
..." And here it spoke a series of short, sharp syllables that to her ear were
totally unrepeatable.
"Miss Emily Dickinson," she replied, holding out her hand.
The bulb creature took her hand in its and she did not flinch though its hand
was far cooler than she expected. Not like something dead but rather like the
back of a snake. There were but three long fingers on the hand.
The creature dropped her hand and gave a small bow, bend-ing at its waist.
"Tell me, Miss Emily
Dickinson, one of your poems."
She folded her hands together and thought for a minute of the dozens of poems
shoved into the drawer of her writing table, of the tens more in her bureau
drawer. Which one should she recite--for she remembered them all? Which one
would be ap-propriate payment for this gray starfarer?
And then she had it. Her voice--ever light--took on color as she said the
poem:
Some things that fly there be--

Birds--Hours--the Bumblebee--
Of these no Elegy.
Some things that stay there be--
Grief-- Hills--Eternity --
Nor this behooveth me.

There are that resting, rise.
Can I expound the skies ?

How still the Riddle lies!
When she was done, she did not drop her head modestly as Miss Lyons had
taught, but rather stared straight into the starfarer's jeweled eyes.
It did not smile this time and she was glad of that. But it took forever to
respond. Then at last it sighed. "I have no poem its equal. But Miss Emily
Dickinson, I can expound the skies."
She did not know exactly what the creature meant.

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"Give me your hand again."
And then she knew. "But I cannot leave my dog."
"I cannot vouchsafe the animal."
She misunderstood. "I can. He will not harm you."
"No. I mean more correctly, I do not know what such a trip will do to him."
"I cannot leave him behind."
The gray creature nodded its bulb head, and she unhesitat-ingly put her hand
in its, following down the anonymous corri-dor and into an inner chamber that
was something like a laboratory.
"Sit here," the starfarer said, and when she sat in the chair a webbing grew
up out of the arms and bound her with filaments of surprising strength.
"Am I a prisoner?" She was not frightened, just curious.
"The lightship goes many miles quickly. The web is to keep you safe."
She thought how a horse starting too quickly to pull a car-riage often knocks
its passenger back against the seat, and un-derstood. "And my dog?"
"Ah-now you see the problem."
"Can he sit here in the chair beside me?"
"The chair is not built for so much weight."
"Then he may be badly hurt. I cannot go."
The creature raised one of its long fingers. "I will put your dog in my
sleeping chamber for as long as we travel." It took Carlo by the collar and
led the unprotesting dog off to a side wall, which opened with the touch of a
button, letting down a short bed that was tidily made. "Here," the creature
com-manded the dog and surprisingly Carlo--who ordinarily obeyed no one but
Emily--leaped onto the bed. The starfarer pushed another button and the bed
slid back into the wall, imprisoning the now-howling
Carlo inside.
"I apologize for my shaggy ally," Emily said.
"There is no need." The gray creature bent over a panel of flashing lights,
its six fingers flying between them. When it had finished, it leaned back into
its own chair and the webbing held it fast.
"Now I will show you what your own planet looks like from the vantage of
space. Do not be afraid, Miss Emily Dickinson."
She smiled. "I am not afraid."
"I did not think so,"
the starfarer said in its peculiar English.
And then, with a great shaking, the lightship rose above Amherst, above
Massachusetts, above the great masses of land and water and clouds and air and
into the stars.
She lay on her bed remembering. Carlo, still moaning, had not seemed to
recover quickly from the trip.
But she had. All she could think about was the light, the dark, the
stars. And the great green-blue globe-like one of Ned's marbles-that was
her home.
What could she tell her family? That's she had flown high above them all and
seen how small they were within the universe? They would say she had had a
dream.
If only I could have returned, like

Mother from her ramblings, a burdock on her shawl to show where she had been,
she thought.
And then she laughed at herself. Her poems would be her burdocks, clinging
stubbornly to the minds of her readers. She sat up in the dark.
The light. The marble of earth.
She would never be able to cap-ture it whole. Only in pieces. But it was
always best to make a start of it.
Begin, as Cook often said, as you mean to go on.
She lit a small candle which was but a memento of that other light. And then
she went over to the writing table. Her mind was a jumble of words, images.

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I do not need to travel further than across this room ever again, she thought.
Or further than the confines of my house.
She had already dwelt in that greatest of possibilities for an hour in a ship
made of light.
The universe was hers, no matter that she lived only in one tiny world. She
would write letters to that world in the form of her poems, even if the world
did not fully understand or ever write back. Dipping the pen into the ink jar,
she began the first lines of a lifetime of poems:
I lost a World--the other day.
Has Anybody found?
You'll know it by the Row of Stars
Around its forehead bound.
This story won the 1998 Nebula for short fiction.
Scanned from Sister Emily's Lightship and Other Stories by Jane Yolen.
A Tor Book. Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC. First Edition: August
2000. ISBN
0-312-87378-6
An excellent book. Purchase recommended.

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